1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to the wiring in electronic systems and, in particular, to a rugged, portable, lightweight, inexpensive, hand tool for connecting a multi-wire electrical cable to an insulation-piercing connector in the field.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are a wide variety of hand tools available for performing a connection of an electrical cable to a connector, such as the familiar modular registered jack connector (RJ) of a telephone connection interface or insulation-piercing connector, examples of which are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,304,074, and 5,306,177. It is a general practice to remove the outer jacket from the end of a cable and to place a connector into the tool. The individual wires are then inserted, one at a time into a terminating tool and crimped before indexing to the next wire. In telephone systems, the wires are typically color coded as a red and green pair and a black and yellow pair, respectively. The red and green pair of telephone lines usually carry voice or data. On an outside telephone company connection, the black and yellow pair can be used for low voltage signals, such as phone lights.
After all of the wires have been crimped, the connector is removed and pushed into the housing by hand. Such practice makes termination by the use of hand tools very cumbersome and time consuming. The technician making the connection must take care to know the proper wire order to avoid mixed/crossed pairs.
The wire insertion process may not be difficult for experienced wire handlers and technicians, who work with the wire bundles and connectors everyday. However, for less experienced users, the manual use of such a hand tool can be very difficult. Prior hand tools used for applying the connectors have also generally been large, awkward, heavy and expensive.
One of the most common types of hand tools of the character described is of a pliers-type tool for effecting a scissors-type motion between a pair of pivotally connected handles. A problem with such pliers-type tools is that they either operate with their closing jaws or dies moving in arcuate paths versus linear paths or complicated toggle arrangements are used which require numerous parts to convert the arcuate movement of the scissors-type handles to linear movement of the jaws. Other non-pliers type hand tools are available but those tools, again, employ an excess number of parts, are excessively bulky and are not easily handled. An example of one type of tool is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,222,292.
There is a need for a simple, portable lightweight hand tool for applying an electrical connector, the jaws or dies of the tool operating in a linear path, and which is simple to operate and/or manipulate. An example of such a need is in the area of terminating or applying cable which include a plurality of individually insulated electrically conductive wires, such as of plastic material. In terminating such cable, a hand tool must apply uniform linear forces between opposing jaws or dies of the tool because of the substantial planar area of the cable to be terminated, i.e. in comparison to terminating a single or discrete wire. Of course, the invention is applicable to a variety of electrical cables wherein the advantages of the invention are of significance.
Often, unshielded twisted pair cabling is used in Ethernet and communication applications. The wires may be connected to a interface card, as is well known to those skilled in the art. Any number of wires may be used but typically, four, six, eight wires may be used in a application of this type. In addition, a color coding scheme is often used. For example, a solid and striped wire color scheme is common, such as white/blue and blue/white, white/orange and orange/white, white/green and green/white and white/brown and brown/white. The solid and striped color combinations are used to determine which pairs of wires must be twisted together in a specific sequence to provide adequate signaling. For example, the wires would be connected to various pins and receiving slots in the jack depending on the end use application. For example, an Ethernet 10 base-T connection could use pins 1 and 2 and 3 and 6, while a communication applications could use pins 4 and 5 and 3 and 6.